Journal Club: Management of Benefits

I hope you find this white paper as interesting as I did.

Aubry, M., Sergi, V., & El Boukri, S. (2019). The Management of Benefits: Opening the Black Box of Benefits and Revealing Their Collective Production. PMI Sponsored Research.

Interesting article quotes:

we quickly noted that our respondents employ many terms to refer to benefits: (a) the value of a project, (b) its goal, (c) the cost savings it will provide, (d) its performance, and (e) the indicators that should be used to evaluate it, among others. This diversity was visible between cases, but, more interestingly, we also found diversity within the same organization…. Moreover, this polysemy is also visible in relation to the absence of a clear definition of performance in most of our cases…. It also alludes to the fact that different stakeholders inside an organization have different perceptions of what the benefits of specific projects can or should be.

In the organizations we studied, benefits that could not be measured tended to be rapidly ignored, in spite of their relative importance.

In the five organizations we studied, we noted that once the project was completed, the evaluation seemed to focus more on how the project was managed rather than on whether or not the identified benefits were materialized. … we contend that benefits management steps happening after the project may be the most difficult to execute.

I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did!